Art History & Archaeology Theses and Dissertations
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Item RISKY BUSINESS: CHANCE AND CONTINGENCY IN AMERICAN ART AROUND 1900(2012) Greenhalgh, Adam Robert; Promey, Sally M.; Kelly, Franklin; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation exposes and interprets unnoticed points of intersection between American visual culture and the rhetoric, logic, and imagery of institutions and disciplines dedicated to rationalizing chance--insurance, census, statistics, probabilism--around 1900, when popular, mathematical, and philosophical conceptions of the accident were undergoing considerable revision. Following the Civil War, experts in a number of disciplines and commercial enterprises counted, measured, and classified individual experiences, bodies, and lives. Statistically minded theorists recognized that, given a large enough sample, phenomena previously considered random or divinely predetermined, such as death, injury, accident, disease, and crime, occurred regularly and were, to a degree, predictable. Anthropometrists also noticed that anatomical and physiognomic traits were distributed according to statistically evident norms. Innovative graphic techniques were developed to visualize, dramatize, and publicize the previously invisible trends, laws, and patterns revealed by such statistical analysis. Insurance underwriters gathered vital statistics and compiled actuarial charts, effectively quantifying lives and configuring individuals in terms of risk. Insurance advertisements portrayed the modern world as a place of hazard and imminent peril manageable only through accident and life coverage. My dissertation demonstrates that this statistical and actuarial calculus manifested in works of art as Americans began to think, speak, and visualize their world in terms of risk, odds, and contingency. Organized as a series of case studies, my work demonstrates that visual culture fully engaged with the abstract concepts--chance, risk--and mathematical disciplines--statistics, probabilism--that informed this emergent worldview. My study builds on recent social histories of chance, enhancing and complicating them by considering understudied imagery--insurance advertising; composite photography; statistical graphics--and period documents overlooked by art historians--census questionnaires; actuarial life tables; Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward--to reveal not only how this material informs major artworks, but also how works of art participated in underwriting an emerging conception of the world as an ultimately indeterminate, chance-based system. Individual chapters focus on artworks clustered roughly around the year 1900: Winslow Homer's mid-1880s paintings of peril at sea, blurry pictorial photographic portraiture by Edward Steichen, and George Bellows's painting Forty-two Kids (1907).Item "The Imagery of the Ear:" Listening and Sound in American Art, 1847-1897(2010) Naeem, Asma; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)America's soundscape underwent tremendous changes from the mid-nineteenth century on: not only in terms of the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph, but also with the noises heard in the city streets, factories, and countryside nearby. During this period, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing explored the intersection of auditory experience and artistic production, creating complex works that gave visual form to the changing nature of sound and listening. All three painters pursued the representation of aurality as career-long endeavors, and developed distinct approaches and pictorial syntaxes. Homer, whose life and artistic outlook were marked by his experience as a traveling Civil War illustrator, painted the everyday sounds of laborers in the American countryside and out at sea in terms of issues related to distance and signaling over space. At a time when a growing number of people were communicating with one another with the aid of such machines as the telegraph and telephone, Homer's long-distance aural exchanges probe the human desire for connectivity, and its converse, separation. Eakins piques our aural imagination with the physiognomic and sartorial acuities of his musicians and singers, not to mention the mimeticism of their actions, and attempts to pack the parallel visual and aural experiences of realism tightly into his paintings, despite the limits of the medium. Transferring his photographic experiments of stopping the human body in mid-motion to the painterly stopping of musical sound in mid-song, Eakins's works evince his personal form of transcription. Whereas Eakins sought to unify the eye, ear, and hand in one split second of representation, Dewing sought to fragment aural moments to pictorialize the psychic effects of listening, and promote the vaults of the imagination. Most notably through attenuated sonic transmissions and the idea of pause, Dewing's representations of women in airless domestic interiors and atmospheric landscapes frequently evince a "pulling apart" of sight and sound that render his depictions of music and speech strangely quiet and unsettling. At the same time, these suspended aural scenarios help to cabin the women he so often portrayed.